Efficient Conflict Graph Creation for Time-Sensitive Networks with Dynamically Changing Communication Demands

TL;DR

This paper introduces a randomized method and heuristics to significantly speed up conflict graph creation for TSN, enabling efficient real-time scheduling in large, dynamic networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel randomized selection process and heuristics that halve conflict graph size and improve scheduling success for time-sensitive networks.

Findings

Conflict graph creation speed improved substantially.

Scheduling success rate increased with new heuristics.

Offline planning for 9000 streams completed within minutes.

Abstract

Many applications of cyber-physical systems require real-time communication: manufacturing, automotive, etc. Recent Ethernet standards for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) offer time-triggered scheduling in order to guarantee low latency and jitter bounds. This requires precise frame transmission planning, which becomes especially hard when dealing with many streams, large networks, and dynamically changing communications. A very promising approach uses conflict graphs, modeling conflicting transmission configurations. Since the creation of conflict graphs is the bottleneck in these approaches, we provide an improvement to the conflict graph creation. We present a randomized selection process that reduces the overall size of the graph in half and three heuristics to improve the scheduling success. In our evaluations we show substantial improvements in the graph creation speed and the scheduling success compared to existing work, updating existing schedules in fractions of a second. Additionally, offline planning of 9000 streams was performed successfully within minutes.